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“Simple truth suppressed”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Let’s start with a thought experiment: imagine that we live in a
world where the thirteen surviving copies of the 1609 quarto of
Shakespeare’s sonnets just didn’t make it. We only know from the
Stationers’ Register entry by Thomas Thorpe on May 20th
1609 (“a Booke called SHAKESPEARES sonnettes”) that such a
book apparently once existed, and also know from Shakespeare’s
contemporary Francis Meres that our playwright wrote “sugared
Sonnets among his private friends”. Naturally, we speculate about
our loss, and we try to imagine what the sonnets might have been
like from our knowledge of the plays.